Demonstrations

@johnrobinbold
www.johnrobinbold.com

Earlier this year, John-Robin Bold released his eponymous debut album on the legendary and recently reactivated label Mille Plateaux. He now introduces us to his Demonstrations: four pieces that share a common compositional process exponentiating the discrepancies between sacred and pop music from four different perspectives. Both of these unique forms of music encompass their own excesses and subtleties into smooth lines in radical contrast with each other. Demonstrations presents a finely tuned focus on profoundly different yet eerily similar aesthetics.

The first stepping-stone of this work was the development of a unique compositional system during the summer of 2015. John-Robin Bold applied a reverb effect to a sacred polyphonic piece of the Renaissance. The process was then re-applied to the resulting recording and repeated over and over again. It created derivatives that were progressively drifting further and further away from the original sound that John-Robin Bold used to compose « I ». These derivatives were then selected, cut and pasted together to form a collage of perspectives; not unlike the methods used in cinema to mold a wider picture. This modus operandi was then expanded upon as it was either progressively refined or deconstructed with each piece over the course of five years.

The main advantage here is that such an operation generates a great range of outcomes when used on multiple different variables. John-Robin Bold has also processed various pieces from our contemporary hedonistic consumerist pop culture following this method. As a result, the artist showcases the non-intuitive similarities of two distinct eras with their own zeitgeists. The two aesthetics embody the respective belief systems of their time, with one aspiring to comprehend eternity while the other is focused on experiencing the present moment. Precisely for this reason however, Bold attempts to distill a universalism within these two sources that goes beyond critiquing their function for clerical or capitalist power.

The use of samples as signifiers enables the artist to adopt a specific historical frame, deliberately lodged amidst the development of western culture. However this framework does not follow any traditional bourgeois views of musical history: “I want my music to convey a sense of elevation, something with a universal potential. However, this seems impossible because today anything is subjected to a relativism of taste. I neither believe that universality in music can occur by returning to some kind of ancient ‘roots’, nor by orientating towards technological progress. Therefore, my music tries to set the scene for its own appearance, to write its own history.”
Demonstrations carries the visions and dreams of what can be created from such a novel vantage point.

Pre-order on Bandcamp

John-Robin Bold - III

A cut from John-Robin's eery yet enveloping new album, 'Demonstrations'.

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Premiere: John-Robin Bold - I

𝐁𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐨𝐧𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲
This profile contains both music and website-specific internet art from my series 'SoundCloud Gazing' which (mis)uses features of SoundCloud to explore how the platform influences listening habits.

- Booking: contact@johnrobinbold.com

Bold/Cowling with @andycowling
albums:
@achim-szepanski
@quanta-records
@mappaeditions